Good enough for now
Yesterday I mentioned working on the site's CSS a bit more. I haven't worked a lot with the CSS Grid system yet, and Luke Harris' blog made well use of it.
But I haven't even had time to look at the current state enough, and I just need both more pain points and more inspiration from other blogs. I'll definitely return to this, as minor design fiddling is just a great way to feel productive. I did fix the lack of contrast on visited links and some minor header issue.
I did write on the site generator a bit, the CSS is now included and not copy and pasted between all three basic templates I have (blog entry, random page, front page). Of course there was the option of including an actual file in the header, but for now I like that each page is complete on its own, with no external images, scripts or styles needed.
The next site stuff I need to do is to add some syntax highlighting if I ever want to blog more about programming while showing my or others work. Perl's POD in its basic form doesn't do that at all, but there are options available. I just don't know whether I'm willing to give up my dependency-free setup.
Status Quo
Other News
I had a relaxing Sunday, not a lot to tell…
I'm getting a bit more into "DTP" for private projects, and it's disappointing on how little this progressed in the last two decades. Adobe's InDesign won over Quark Xpress, so it's almost a monopology on the commercial frontier – even old second tier products like FrameMaker or Microsoft Publisher are barely worth mentioning.
Affinity Publisher is getting more popular in some circles I'm running in, but it's a lot behind the big players. In its second major version, it just got proper footnotes. Column handling hasn't reached the levels of InDesign or even old Ventura Publisher, so magazine or even more complex textbook layouts are straining it. Never mind a good automatization pipeline.
Of course, there's always TeX, especially its ConTeXt version, which aims at easier modification of visual elements, as opposed to the old science-paper focused LaTeX. But a non-WYSIWYG workflow hurts here.
A new version of Scribus, the only open source DTP attempt just came out. I'm going to give it a try on a more recent machine than this one soon (I keep an old MacOS version on this Macbook Air, to run 32 bit software). But previous versions lacked a lot of features, almost demanding of you to script a lot in the built-in Python language, bringing you half-way between TeX and proper DTP…